I think that vehicles is not a minor feature of BT universe battleground. And you just cannot avoid it. So many battles are won\lost by your tanks while mechs fail miserably due to some bad rolls

I would LOVE to roll on a some kind of tank or long range support unit to shoot some enemy mechs. AND partisipate in some kind of scenario other than dethmatch at relatively low expence\from other perspective (I cannot afford Assault mech at a time\tired of pilloting such mechs\want NEW role on a field)
That may be realised as player being a commander of an armour unit (command vehicle plus like 3 escorts). That will allow some survivibility and DPM to such units. Otherwise players will be turned away by dying horribly in 5 sec under fire.

That will diverse gameplay
will make more scenarios possible
will help to scale UP\down engagements
That will make battles more like canon battles, other than just lance skirmishes and duels (if only mech are present)

Will improve "role gameplay" by addint more posibilities into the mix.
Like: room for additional "commander" skills like "call armour support" (couple of AI controlled tanks under general player control (RTS of some sorts)), or deploy "LRM battery" (2 LRM carriers) -> additional targets for "Role gameplay" "Light mech diversions and raids"

There's a possibility they might consider this down the road. I absolutely loved piloting tanks and such in Living Legends, but I honestly wouldn't count on this happening.

Right now, my hope is that vehicles will make an appearance in the form of NPC run command abilities. Being able to call in VTOL or Aerospace air support and such (rather than just having an instant napalm strike) would be really neat; it'd keep the game 'mech focused but provide some extra non-'mech complexity to things and give a reason for anti-aircraft 'mechs to exist.

I also love combined arms, the Dev's say they want to do this but can't for launch but later, probably way later down the road it may happen. I doubt they will be pilotable by players but possibly as AI support you purchase or as part of missions which would be what I hope. In other words you have no control over what they do, they are part of a mission and you gots to deal with the local militia pukes that may or may not help your merc or mech unit. It really follows the fiction and can be fun or funny to deal with. How about in the middle of a battle a House News Unit VTOL comes rolling into the map and feeds info into both sides coms while describing the battle. Giving intel away, yet you can't shoot them down even if you want to or you might have to protect them if its your house news unit. This happened to me during a TT game and I kept firing warning shots at the news helo but it kept filming and giving away our sneaky units and our strategy to the bad guys. And since the bad guys were known to pose as reporters and go derka derka and blow themselves up and our units up trust me I really wanted to shoot the helo down but our AA unit kept missing. But it nearly cost us the mission and we had to change tactics to distract the Helo to a different area of the map so we could continue our mission and flanking maneuver. So I had two of my more flashy mechs a Firestarter and a Jenner start pretend fighting and shooting lots and missing lots way away so the Helo just flew over to where all the cool shots for the publich was happening.

What the Dev's have described are strafing runs, in a straight line from board edge to board edge exactly as described in TT canon. So expect a 5km long strafing run hitting friend and foe alike possibly.

A. At the moment we are not following up with combined arms (tanks, hovercraft, jets etc.)

Well, at least they didn't say "never". MWLL does great with it's combined arms gameplay. Seeing mechs, tanks, aerotech fighters and VTOLs all used together on the same map creates an unique feel of real BT battlefield. And it's quite balanced too, every type of assets have it's strengths and weaknesses.